“So what did you have, and when?” asked a woman at the next bar table over.
“I had a little girl grandbaby on May 10,” said the other woman at the table. “She’s a Human Race baby. She was born on the Day of the Human Race.”
The blonde girl sobbed, red-faced. “My feet hurt so much,” she wailed.
The parents had miscalculated, not recognized from the short line on the trail map the vertical intensity ahead, and now they had a small daughter who could not take another step.
Their older daughter, sturdier and independent, leaned close. “It’s OK,” the older sister said. “You will be OK. You and your pretty face.”
“This one has the chip in it,” the passenger said, sliding her passport across the podium.
“The chip,” said the TSA agent. “That’s just one of those measures they’re using to…”
He paused a long time for a man facing a long line. Then he used his fingers, which were gloved in blue latex, to mark two languid quotes in the air.
“…keep us safe,” he said. Then he winked at me.
“I told my father he calls me cheeky, and my father said, ‘You better watch out. I don’t think that means what you think it means.’ And I said, ‘Of course I know what it means. He’s from South Africa. He means it in a funny way. He means that I’m sassy and combustible.’ It’s because I tease him all the time. He’s an old person, and he’s married. But he forgets that.”
“All of the sudden, the house started shaking, and I thought, oh my gosh, is there an earthquake in Iowa? And it was the ice sliding off my roof and I was there by myself because it was Tuesday.”
“What do you recommend off the appetizer list?” asked the customer.
“Well, my personal favorite is the frog’s legs,” said the waiter. “But a lot of people don’t want to be steered in that direction.”
“What do they taste like?” asked the customer.
“Well, similar to, well, chicken.”
“I’ll take the mussels,” said the customer.
“I would hate having a baby in winter,” one friend said.
“That’s the problem with babies—you have to keep them all year ‘round,” said the other friend. “The solution is to have them in the tropics.”
